Another Icarus Story: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel

I was planning on writing a nice blog post about Catcher in the Rye, about Holden’s relationship with Allie or something in that vein. But two days ago I picked up the graphic novel Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and knew within ten pages that I wanted to write about that. (This isn’t supposed to be a review, but − read it. It’s amazing. I promise.)

For starters, Fun Home is very much a coming-of-age novel. It’s Bechdel’s memoir, narrating her childhood and adolescence in rural Pennsylvania and her experience coming out as a lesbian in college in the 1980s. However, it mainly centers on her relationship with her father, a troubled and borderline-abusive English teacher, funeral director, and obsessive aesthete. He dies in an accident when Bechdel is 20, an incident that she believes (but can’t confirm) was suicide. Around the same time, she discovers his lifelong secret – he’s had numerous affairs with men and teenage boys, including her babysitter and several of his students. These aren’t spoilers – Bechdel lays them out early on and spends the rest of the book circling her and her father’s lives from different angles, supplying new information each time.

                Literature is a central theme in Fun Home. Alison’s father is an English teacher, and they bond over books. The novel contains references to seemingly half the Western literary canon, ranging from Joyce to Wilde to Camus to Wind in the Willows to The Odyssey to Lord of the Rings. (My mom asked me if my 12-year-old brother would like this book. His favorite series is Dragonball Z, and this book is full of phrases like “his absence resonated retroactively”.) This is a deliberate storytelling choice; Bechdel tells the reader at one point, “I employ these allusions [...] not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms.” This is the best way she knows to tell her story, because it’s the tradition she grew up in. Most relevant to this class, though: there are many references to books we’ve read in class this semester.

The most obvious parallel to a book from our class comes from Catcher in the Rye. As a high schooler, Alison ends up in her father’s English class, a class called “Rites of Passage” (“Coming of Age Novel”, anyone?). They are reading Catcher, and Alison’s father asks the class who Mr. Antolini is. The class is silent, and he goes on to explain that he’s Holden’s teacher, and he made a pass at him. Bechdel points out, through her narration, that a) sitting in back of the class is a preternaturally handsome football player who’s currently “helping my dad haul junk out of the basement” (implied that’s not all they’re doing), and b) Alison’s father has a “great capacity for cognitive dissonance”. While I read Fun Home, I drew the connection between Bruce Bechdel and Mr. Antolini, and was happy when the book made that comparison as well.

In many ways, Alison Bechdel bears a lot of similarity to Stephen Dedalus. In fact, she herself acknowledges this. Alison and her father bond over Joyce, and he encourages her to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, saying, “You damn well better identify with every page”. The very first chapter of the novel is titled “Old Father, Old Artificer”.  Fun Home uses some of the same imagery that Portrait does: the book opens with a young Alison playing airplane with her father, a moment of “rare physical contact”. She likens this game to Dedalus and Icarus: soaring in the air, held up by her father. Like Joyce in Portrait, she calls into question who is Dedalus and who is Icarus. Her father’s craftsmanship and obsessive attention to detail seem to make him the “old artificer”, but he is also the one who suffers the fall. Like Stephen, Alison goes through artistic and sexual epiphanies over the course of the story, culminating in a moment of metaphorical flight where she reconciles the Dedalus/Icarus paradox, illustrated by a young Alison jumping into a pool and her father’s waiting arms:

“What if Icarus hadn’t hurtled into the sea? What if he’d inherited his father’s inventive bent? What might he have wrought?” Implying, of course, that she is what Icarus could have been – a successful artist (in her case, cartoonist), and, of course, alive.

“He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.” No, her father is Icarus. Are they both Icarus, in their own way?